But her husband, having impregnated her, was more guilty than she, for he was the cause of it all. Hence, her insane logic added, he and she would be better off dead than leading a sinful life. She should, therefore, kill him and kill herself. Furthermore, her children being the offspring of murderers, must be themselves tainted with criminal tendencies and should also be saved from a life of crime. When she was brought to me she had attempted to kill the entire family by turning on the gas faucets all over the house about two o'clock in the morning.
The lawmakers who prevented that woman from having an operation performed legally, (which would remove the fear of crime) safely, by a reputable practitioner, (which would remove the fear of consequences), openly, (which would remove the fear of social ostracism), would have been responsible for the death of several people, had she not accidentally awakened her husband by upsetting a chair on her way back to her bed.
There are thousands of neurotics, suffering from a feeling of inferiority, who are unfit to become mothers until their morbidity has been cured by psychotherapy, and who, if allowed to bear children, will train a new generation to behave in a negative, neurotic, socially baneful way.
=The Children of Neurotic Mothers=, in whom the fear and hatred of sex and love is rampant, will some day become prostitutes or puritans, both of them degrading love equally.
I cannot follow Freud when he states that every neurosis has its root in a failure of the love life, but some of the artificial obstacles created by a stupid puritanical civilisation between man and the full realisation of his sexual goal have not infrequently wrecked a life which, neurotically oriented as it was, might have gone on, in a socially tolerable way, for years and perhaps until the individual's death.
Difficulties due to the use of improper or misunderstood contraceptive appliances, the terrors of pregnancy, actual or expected, the fear of abortion, the sufferings following abortion in a complex-ridden organism, have too often upset a balance which at best was precarious.
=Birth Control and Indulgence.= Certain critics of birth control attack it on the ground that it would lead to "overindulgence" of the sex relationship. Those people are generally unprepossessing, worn, individuals who are trying to compensate for their sexual weakness by making a virtue out of an unavoidable inferiority. Their opposition to what they call "overindulgence" (one thing which nature hardly ever allows, barring rare morbid cases of priapism) is grotesque in the case of married couples.